The Coldest City on Earth

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We are all adventurers here, I suppose, and wild doings in wild countries appeal to us as nothing else could do. It is good to know that there remain wild corners of this dreadfully civilised world. Robert Falcon Scott, British explorer

It was a warm evening, sometime at the beginning of summer last year. I was having dinner and - as I sometimes do while dining at home - was watching some fragments of documentaries on TV. I remember a heavily dressed British woman, somewhere on a foggy airport tarmac, explaining how difficult it is for the workers to keep the airplanes in proper condition for the next flights, due to the extremely low outside temperatures: -40°C and below.

A city in such a harsh environment? With an airport, even? It quickly sparked my curiosity. What is the name of this city and where is it located?

Its name is Yakutsk, a city of 270 000 inhabitants, located in far eastern Siberia. You can zoom out the map below to see how far away from every major city it is.



It turns out this city is in the same region as Oymyakon, a village declared the coldest inhabited place on Earth, where the record lowest temperature was -67.7°C, in 1933.

The geographical particularities of this region, called Sakha Republic or Yakutia, make it the coldest region in the Northern Hemisphere (yes, even colder than the Arctic) and the second coldest one on Earth after Antarctica. The high latitudes and reduced sunshine combined with the great distances to the ocean cause the air temperature to fall to extremely low values during winter. There's no other place that does better justice to the trademark "Siberian cold" than Yakutia.

At the time, finding out about Yakutsk was a mere curiosity. A cool place to add to the list of interesting facts I know about our planet. It might as well have been on Mars, Pluto, or another stellar system altogether.

Then, winter came in my home country, bringing the dreaded cold and discomfort. And each time I complained about it, I would suddenly remember about the frigid city at the end of the world. How does that cold feel like? How do they cope with it? How did they manage to survive, let alone thrive, in those conditions? I had flown over Siberia twice, a few years ago, on my trip to Japan - an infinite expanse of green, unattractive nothingness, that's how it seemed to me from 10 km above. Maybe it was time to take a much closer look, on the ground.

The curiosity grew and grew, and it soon became a sketch of a plan. Then, sometime in November, I set in motion all the preparations for the upcoming trip to Yakutsk. I specifically chose January. The coldest month in the coldest city, a fitting time to visit it at its most extreme state.

Temperature statistics for Yakutsk. Source: http://www.pogodaiklimat.ru

I knew extensive preparation would be needed for this one, which would be unlike any other trip I've ever undertaken. So I spent about 2 months doing research on the city itself, Siberia, the climate and the effects of extreme cold on the human body and, probably most importantly, the clothing equipment that you need to stay alive out there.

Next post: The Gear Against the Extreme Cold